A Democratic blowout gives Biden a chance to regroup and crow a little
Going into Tuesday’s elections, the political class was obsessed with one poll showing President Biden running behind Donald Trump in key battleground states. The incumbent’s critics reveled in excruciating enumerations of his problems while many Democrats (often off the record) wondered whether he was up to the 2024 battle.
Then the voters cast their ballots.
Of a sudden, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to say, attention has shifted to the more important fact about American politics: The profound weaknesses of a Republican Party that is at sea on the abortion issue, mired in what Democratic candidates couldn’t stop calling “MAGA extremism,” and astonished that its dog whistles — “wokeness” in the schools and crime — went largely unheard.
It should, of course, be possible to keep several ideas in your head at the same time. Democrats would do well to resist their tendency to veer from complacency to panic and back. Biden does have a lot of problems to solve. The pundits who overread the meaning of a single poll can also overread a day’s worth of election results.
Even so, it’s rare for an offoff-year election to yield such an unambiguous outcome. This was a Democratic blowout. Little analysis is required. A catalogue of what happened tells the story.
In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin bet his political future on captaining a Republican sweep to take control of both houses of the state legislature by holding the state House of Delegates and winning the state Senate from the Democrats.
There was a sweep. It went the other way. With a campaign relentlessly focused on protecting abortion rights, Democrats held the Senate and took back the House.
Youngkin was a double loser. The personal political capital he invested in these races went up in smoke. And his claim that a ban on abortion only after the 15th week of pregnancy would neutralize the issue for his party instead ended up highlighting the question that was helping Democrats all across the state. No wonder he quibbled that he was for a “limit,” not a “ban.”
The outcome was also a defeat for the big GOP donors who thought Youngkin was the answer to their prayers for an alternative presidential nominee to Donald Trump. They will have to keep praying.
The marquee fight was Ohio’s referendum enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution. Republicans did all they could to distort and mislead about what was at stake. They even tried to render a majority moot with a failed referendum in August to require a 60% majority for constitutional change.
The voters in a solidly Trump state were neither deterred nor fooled. They approved Tuesday’s referendum by a 13-point margin and, in the process, provided a template for abortion rights supporters in other red states to follow when their Republican legislatures pass abortion bans.
Ohio and Virginia made two things clear. The Dobbs decision rendered by a right-wing Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade is a disaster for the GOP because it shifted the political energy on the abortion issue toward Democrats. And contrary to predictions that the abortion issue would fade over time, its power is undiminished.
Abortion rights also helped Democrat Daniel Mccaffery win a state Supreme Court race in Pennsylvania, a good sign for Biden’s party in a key swing state, and even in Kentucky, a state that voted for Trump by 26 points in 2020, abortion was part of the arsenal of issues that helped Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear win reelection easily. (Memo to poll obsessives: One survey right before the election showed Beshear even or, by one measure, slightly behind.) In searing television commercials, Beshear called out his opponent, Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, for not even favoring exceptions to abortion prohibitions in cases of rape or incest. Cameron denied this, but his response was ambiguous and plainly defensive.
Beshear’s victory was at least as much about a deep connection he forged with the state’s voters with his daily broadcasts during the pandemic and Kentucky’s strong economy, spurred in part by investments backed by Biden’s economic program.
Beshear provided a model for how Democrats can make progress in red states. His party will take notice. If a national star faded in Virginia, a new one was born in Kentucky. Beshear ran up huge votes in the blue cities of Louisville and Lexington, while cutting GOP margins in rural and small-town Kentucky. Base mobilization and reassurance to swing voters need not be in conflict. It’s a useful lesson for Team Biden.
Republicans can scratch for bits of good news. The GOP’S victory in a county executive race in New York’s Suffolk County continued a drift toward the GOP in 2022 that helped them pick up House seats in a Democratic state. Republicans held off a spirited challenge for the governorship in Mississippi and easily picked up another in Louisiana in October. But it’s a bad sign if you have to reach so deeply into your base to find something to brag about.
Tuesday’s bombshells pointed almost entirely toward Democratic resilience and Republican weakness. Yes, Biden has much work to do in dealing with voters’ worries about his age, high prices and immigration. But imagine what we’d have heard if Republican efforts in Kentucky and, at the end, in Virginia to make the elections about Biden had defeated Democrats. Dodging that bullet gives Biden a chance to regroup and to crow just a little, as he did on X: “Voters vote,” he wrote. “Polls don’t.”
E.J. Dionne is on X: @Ejdionne